Representatives from the Dartmouth Graduate Student Council (GSC) recently attended the 2018 Ivy+ Summit. The Summit was hosted by Cornell University on October 26th through the 28th in Ithaca, NY, and is held each year to bring together graduate students from similar institutions to share experiences and discuss challenges and achievements from the prior year. Ten institutions were invited to the summit, including Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, MIT, Dartmouth and the University of Chicago.
The Summit commenced with a welcome gathering on Friday evening, providing an opportunity for the representatives from each school to get to know one another. Official programming started Saturday morning with the State of the Campuses address. In this forum, the Presidents of each school’s council gave a 10-minute presentation highlighting ongoing initiatives, including the greatest achievement from the last year and upcoming projects for the 2018-2019 academic year. Time was reserved after each presentation for questions.
The rest of the day was dedicated to smaller break-out sessions to facilitate conversation on various topics. Four separate topics were discussed in each of the 1.5-hour blocks, and included Physical Health and Insurance, Mental Health, Working with Senior Administrators, Housing, Unionization, Supporting Students with Families, Professional Development, Campus Sustainability, Campus Climate, Diversity and Inclusion, Sexual Harassment and Assault, Responding to National Issues, Campus Social Life, Purpose of the Ivy+, among others. Representatives from Dartmouth participated in the many different sessions, discussing the greatest challenges that face graduate students at Dartmouth, sharing our best practices, and learning how other graduate students and schools approach the many different aspects of graduate student education. At noon, the group heard from Dean Knuth, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at Cornell University, and delegates had the opportunity to talk with various administrators over lunch.
Sunday morning, the final day of the Summit, the entire group met to discuss the mission and purpose of the Ivy+. Realizing that it might be beneficial to have an official way to make decisions, we brainstormed potential language for the development of an Ivy+ Constitution which would outline how we vote on various topics. The development of the document is ongoing, with the hope that it will be completed within the coming months.
Dartmouth was represented by Faith Anderson, GSC Vice President, Rachel Brog, Graduate Housing Activities Coordinator, and Katharine von Herrmann, GSC President. A detailed summary of the conference will be presented at the next GSC meeting on December 4th in Carson L01. All Dartmouth graduate students are welcome to attend.
The 2019 Ivy+ Summit will be hosted by Princeton University in Princeton, NJ next fall.
